Hell Or High Water
by CornishGirl
Summary: Mary gutted both boys when she walked out on her sons, but the Winchester way was not to discuss it. Sam might try, Dean wouldn't. But this time Dean actually reached out to Sam, who responded with a very unexpected and shocking question: What was it like to resurrect as a demon?


Been_ a looong time since I wrote a fic, thanks to RL taking over, but the urge returned, and so did the time I needed. Many things have happened to our boys since the last story I wrote, and I think we're all still processing the changes. Plus now mourning the upcoming final season. It's going to be very, very hard to watch this last season, and I expect to be in floods of tears during the_ _finale_._ But this SPN family is so wonderful, and the stories and characters so enduring, that I trust-no, I pray!-__many will continue to write outstanding stories. Let's keep the boys alive!_

_Angst, and brotherhood. As we know and love them._

_Reviews are so very welcome! We writers love to know what you_ think!

* * *

** Hell Or High Water**

* * *

As he so often did, Dean, on the bed and slumped against the wall in his utilitarian bunker room, picked up the faded, creased photos beneath the bedside lamp. Dean as a boy, with his mother. Older Dean, with Sam, not long after he dragged him away from Stanford. Bobby had taken it at his place upon their return from a highly satisfying hunt, and he had caught them laughing like loons with one another.

How long had it been since they laughed together like that? Wide open to the moment, not bogged down in the agenda of the angels, not wrapped up in trying to stop the Apocalypse and save the world. Just a straightforward hunt, like old times. Find the fugly, kill it. Like their father had taught them, though John never got to see Sam as a true adult, as the hunter he'd become. Sam had been just twenty-two when John died, and still mired in the head-butting dance of two vastly opinionated Winchesters.

John, who needed. Sam, who _wanted_.

And Dean in the middle.

Now? He wished there was a middle to _be_ in, even one fraught with emo and anger, with the seething fury of a brilliant adolescent boy, and a hard-headed, hard-assed father.

And yet. And . . . yet. It wasn't so bad these days. These days it really was just the two of them. No Dad. No Bobby. And no Mom, who'd come and gone before Sammy had grown up to become _Sam_; Mom, who had come and gone yet again, this time by choice but a handful of days before.

Impulse took hold of him. Dean dropped the photos to his bedside table and swung his legs over the side, thrusting himself to his feet. As usual he hadn't dumped boots before dropping onto the bed, so there was no pause to find footwear. He just strode out of his room and into the hall, heading for his brother.

# # #

Sam had paced awhile, trying to shed tension in his body. Trying to sort through the vast array of emotions engendered by Mary Winchester's abrupt departure. Pacing had always been a friend to him, a means to engage body and brain. When he couldn't sleep, and drink didn't do it, he paced. Sometimes through the hallways in the wee small hours, but only where he was certain Dean wouldn't exit his room on his way to take a piss in the communal bathroom down the hall and stumble across his insomniac brother, which would occasion questions, evasions, and eventually an answer, because Dean could always get out of him even the things he didn't wish to surrender, and then Dean would recommend yet another drink, as he always did.

So he paced, and drank, and finally dropped into a chair at the heavy wooden table and gave himself over to quietude, to an emotional numbness, with a bottle and tumbler at his elbow.

Sam knew he drank too much these days. Oh, nothing like his father had, or Bobby, or Dean. Dean probably headed down that road because he wanted to be like his father in _everything_. Asked, Dean likely would have denied that was the reason behind it, but there was no question the oldest surviving male Winchester could toss it back hard and heavy. Probably these days could keep up with John at his worst, and easily.

Sam had never been one for so much alcohol, but it had crept up on him. He thought he crossed the line from social to _purposeful_ drinking the night he carried Dean's dead body, chest riven open by Metatron's angel blade, into the bunker, into Dean's room, and laid him down upon the bed. He had, with a singleminded determination, pulled the torn shirts from the body, redressed it; had spent careful and benumbed minutes cleaning his brother's face of the smeared blood, patting the cuts carefully, though Dean could feel nothing. He remembered remarking inside his head at the time that none of the cuts needed stitching and thus wouldn't mar that markedly handsome face—and a moment later realized you don't stitch up a dead man anyway.

That night he had sat down alone and consumed half a carafe of whiskey, thinking about a dead brother, and deals. Dad with his, for Dean. Dean with his, for Sam.

Now? Now it was Sam's turn.

So he tossed back the whiskey hard, like Dean, like their father, and fast, and had gone to the dungeon to summon Crowley and _demand_ that he bring Dean back. It might cost Sam one year, five, ten—but infinitely worth it.

And habit, as it had become clear. Deals over death were what Winchesters did.

Crowley had answered, all right. But he didn't show up in the dungeon, as Sam fully expected. Instead, the King of Hell had collected his Knight and taken him off the board.

Sam, at a different table, felt a shiver of remembered emotion overtake his body. Crowley hadn't come. Somehow the demon had answered the summons, yet evaded Sam. Maybe it was just that once you'd been in the bunker, and if you were _invited_ in, much like vampire myths, you had free run of the place.

That moment, that horrible, breath-stopping moment of realization, the discovery that the room was empty of a very dead Dean—

"Hey."

Sam startled. Dean wore heavy boots, but stealth was bred in his bones. The only time his steps were hard enough to hear was if he stomped off in anger, or clomped off on some mundane mission like a heat-seaking missle. Otherwise, he was silent. Despite the bowed legs, he never scuffed, never tripped over his own feet the way Sam had for so many years, when his body was rearranging itself from scrawny pre-adolescence into a very tall adulthood. He'd shot up to overtop both his brother and father, but it hadn't been easy.

These days he could be silent, just like Dean, and walk his way into danger, then out of it again.

Dean grinned, the flesh by his eyes creasing. The years were advancing, taking Dean with them; his looks had matured out of the "pretty boy" days John had teased his eldest about into something Sam knew, because he'd heard the ladies say it often enough, was more accurately described as alpha male hotness. Still had the high cheekbones, the hollows, the angles, the blade-sharp jawline.

And as Sam looked up from the table to see that brother come walking so silently into the library, the clean purity of Dean's face was abruptly overlayed by the cuts, the blood, the slackness of death as the body lay on the bed.

Sam had to blink it away hard, that vision, as Dean headed to the fridge. Something was on his brother's mind, Sam realized, but as usual Dean said nothing, made no effort to introduce a topic. He pulled out a beer, popped the cap, came back toward the table. His expression was somber, his eyes evaluating his brother. As Dean pulled out a chair and sat down across from him, Sam thought it was possible Dean actually felt like _talking_. Going emo.

"So." Dean took a long gulp of beer. His tone was light, but the expression in his eyes was not. He was watchful, wary, trying to suss out Sam's mindset. "You brooding over Mom? Because if you are, if you're mad at me for being so blunt in running her out of here . . . well, I'd do it again, Sammy. She gutted you with that. It was no more than abandonment. _Again_."

"She didn't exactly have a choice the first time." Sam kept his tone mild because his words were not. "Being burned on the ceiling, after all, with her belly ripped open."

Dean thumped the bottle down upon the wood. _His_ tone was not mild. "She had a choice, Sam. She _made_ that choice ten years before . . . to give her son to hell."

Sam didn't hesitate. "To save Dad, you said. Well, that's not any different from what _he_ did, to save you. What _you_ did, to save me. And what I _tried_ to do after Metatron killed you."

"Sam—"

"But no, that's not what I was thinking about. And I wasn't brooding. I was _remembering_."

Dean relaxed, a crooked smile forming. "Yeah? About some unnamed conquest?—though that would mean you _had_ a conquest, and I don't think you've been _up_ to that much of late."

The innuendo was typical Dean when engaged with his favorite target. But Sam wasn't up to _this_. "No," he said. "I wasn't remembering a girl. Or Mom. I was remembering what it felt like to walk into that room expecting to see my dead brother's body on the bed . . . and finding it empty."

And just like that, _just like that_, the teasing was gone from Dean's expression. He physically withdrew more deeply into the chair, hand slack on the beer bottle, lips parting. Even as the eloquent eyes stared back at Sam in shock, his face was stripped bare of all but disbelief, that Sam would bring up the topic.

"What was it like?" Sam asked, and realized whiskey was overtaking his natural sense of caution when it came to peeling back the onion that was his brother. "I always wondered. You never said."

Dean swallowed twice, but did not duck an answer. "Said what?"

"What _resurrection_ is like."

Sam waited. Dean had on two occasions come clean about things that had shredded him emotionally: when he told Sam his time in hell had been forty years, not four months; and when he admitted that he had _enjoyed_ torturing people. Enjoyed putting souls on the rack and cutting them up.

Sam had enough background in psychology to grasp that _enjoyment_ wasn't what Dean meant, even if he himself didn't realize it. Dean was neither sociopath nor psycho, to get off on butchery. Even in hell. But it was a form of release, of escape, of _utter_ _relief_, to save himself from horrors unimaginable, to lose himself in the blood and the cutting of the flesh because it meant _he_ wasn't bleeding, _he_ wasn't being sliced and diced. That this was now _his _choice: no longer victim, but victor, and Sam had a sneaking suspicion that Alastair might not have been so pleased to have Dean on the other end of the knife. He'd made his own promise, had Alastair, and the demon could no longer put Dean up on the rack.

Dean had sorted out, now, how he wanted to react, and that he intended to control the conversation. Sam had expected it and was unsurprised

Dean's tone was belligerent. Challenging. _"You_ were resurrected. At Cold Oak. How did _you_ feel?"

Sam shook his head once. "It was different. It had to be."

Dean still pushed. "In what way different?"

"I came back a human."

And that, Sam saw, was more than his brother could handle.

# # #

Dean did not recall exactly how it happened, the actual steps the motions required, but he was up from the table and about four strides away, half-turned to escape to his room, when he stopped himself. After an irresolute moment, he swung back to face his brother full-on.

Sam was still seated at the table. In the muted light of the bunker the hollows of his face were accentuated, shadows created by the fall of hair around his face. The pudgy kid, the gawky boy, the tall but slender young man was all grown, now, mature in body and face. It wasn't the kid who was asking, or the pissy adolescent, or the rebellious young man. It was Sam as he was now: fully grown, fully versed in the beatings the world doled out, emotionally and physically. While Sam did often surrender arguments when they verged on the "I'm older so I'm right" claim, he didn't sit still for foolishness. When asked, he didn't duck the hard questions. And he certainly knew how to dole them out.

This Sam, these days, expected answers.

Dean knew it was in him to refuse. Usually he deflected, but this topic was impossible to deflect. It was too sharp. It cut too close to the bone. And wasn't _that_ a lovely metaphor for a man who had himself done that very thing with Alastair's knives in hell. He could walk away from the topic, he knew, literally as well as figuratively, and shut it down that way. He wasn't being forced to answer, held at gunpoint, knifepoint, or werewolf/vampire _teeth_point.

He was being asked, and by his brother.

Sam had died. Sam had been to hell. Been possessed by an angel. Other than departing for Stanford against their father's sharply worded objections, and the occasional brotherly partings needed for cool-down periods in a sometimes overheated familial relationship, Sam had always been there for him.

But, damn. _Damn_.

"Sammy—" Yet he broke it off. He didn't know how to begin, how to frame the middle, how to end it.

Sam did not say _Nevermind_, or _I shouldn't have pried_, or _I'm sorry I said anything. _Sam just waited_._

'_You're not telling, and I'm not asking'._ So he had told Sam about hell, and what sins he had committed. And wasn't _that_ irony, that a man in hell had nowhere to be sent to for such sins.

There were no threats in hell. No damnation. Just chaos. Death, and death again, dismemberment, evisceration, castration, body drawn and quartered on the rack, fingers and toes ripped from hands and feet, tongue severed from his mouth. But the latter didn't last very long, because Alastair loved having his latest subject talk. And cry out.

And _scream_.

He recalled his first moment after death, of being hung spread-eagled in the air by chains. The meathooks thrust through his body. The frantic shouts for his brother, moments after his heart stopped and his soul fell to hell.

Whom he had saved, and gone to hell _for_.

For whom he would do it again.

Dean turned away once more, but this time it was to pull a whiskey tumbler from a shelf. Then it was a handful of strides back, resuming his seat, placing the empty glass in the center of the table. Tacit invitation. Tacit command, older to younger.

A corner of Sam's mouth lifted oh so slightly. He did the honors with one broad, long-fingered hand, dwarfing the bottle. Whiskey glugged into the glass, and then Sam pushed it toward his brother as he set down the bottle in the middle of antique wood instead of pulling it back toward himself.

Dean's hands closed around the tumbler, fingers interlocked themselves. But he left the glass there, wrapped up in his hands, while he stared at the whiskey. He could not feel himself blinking. Maybe because he wasn't. Couldn't. He just stared at the whiskey, and let the memories come.

"I was halfway back to hell," he said at last. "I think. It's not clear. But then I was back in my body instead, and Crowley was talking. I don't know what he said; all I heard was a voice at first, and then just a jumble of words. I couldn't put them together, couldn't understand. It was like a handful of spilled birdshot, words bouncing and rolling away. I remember something about the moon, and howling. And he put that thing, that _blade_ in my hand, and then I was back-but I wasn't . . . I wasn't _me_."

He stopped then, lifted the tumbler to his mouth and drank, then set it back down and cradled it once more. Sam was focused on him, but merely listening. Dean knew his brother had no intention to speak. It was Dean's to say what he would, or not.

"I could feel myself," he continued. "I knew who I was, what had happened. But I was different. It was like a slow tidal wave sweeping in, and then it became a tsunami. Just—just the _differentness_. It didn't matter anymore. Any of it. All that we'd done to save ourselves, others, the world? None of it _mattered_. And I stopped caring. I felt it, Sammy. I _felt_ myself stop caring. Morality? Hah. Regret? Nope. _It just didn't matter_. Lucifer could walk the earth again and meet Michael for that final battle, destroying the world in the meantime, but I didn't care anymore. In fact, I thought it might be kind of cool, to watch everything be burned to a cinder. Because I'd survive. I was immortal. I was Cain's weapon, and Crowley's weapon, and maybe even the weapon Abaddon might have wanted, had she seen the potential instead of merely threat."

"Crowley's doing," Sam said.

Dean caught his brother's gaze. "He played me, Sammy. He knew what would happen if I took on the Mark of Cain and took _up_ the First Blade. Instead of saying "If you can't beat 'em, join 'em," he decided he could have _me_ join _him_. Because every _King_ of Hell needs his Knight of Hell."

Sam's eyes were full of slow realization. "Street cred."

Dean's mouth firmed. "There are other hunters out there he could have used. Hell, he could have picked _you_—but then there was the matter of you once intended to be the Boy-King of hell long before Crowley took the throne. You'd be competition. Me, though . . . I was the Righteous Man. Michael's Sword. I broke the first Seal. I set it all in motion." Dean grimaced, threw back whiskey again. "I was low-hanging fruit, so eager to take Abaddon out. But he couldn't just hand me the Blade, even if he'd had it at the time. I was fully human. I couldn't have weilded it. Probably it would have killed me, if I tried. It needed the Mark. And so Crowley needed Cain."

"And you."

"It changed me, Sam. It was—it was all-powerful. It wanted. It needed. It was _alive_, Sammy. I don't know how, but it was alive in me. Violence fed it, strengthened it, and it's not like we led apple pie lives to start with. Crowley knew what it would do to me. At some point he figured it out." Dean shook his head. "It disgusted me, what the Blade was doing—I killed that Styne kid, who was harmless-but I couldn't stop it. By then it—and I—just needed to kill. So that's what I did. And then Metatron, maybe not an archangel but pretty high up the food chain, nailed me with his sword."

Sam's brows knit briefly, eased. "Did you know, inside?—I mean, that you were dead? That maybe the Mark suspended you, or something?"

"I don't know. I just remember that Crowley's words finally made sense, that the Blade was back in my hand and the Mark rejoiced . . . and what was still human in me was flowing out and away. Demon smoke rising, only it was humanity leaving the shell. Finally it was just the merest thread, one strand, maybe, and I was ready to let it go. Ready to be someone, and some_thing_, else."

"Crowley made you into his bounty hunter."

"More like his attack dog." Dean chewed briefly at his bottom lip, eyes averted. "That was for starters. The appetizer. It was training. He knew I could kill, but as a human I didn't kill other humans. Not to free a soul. Only if they were dangerous to other humans. But he didn't reckon with the First Blade and the Mark combined. Too much even for him. But not . . . not too much for me. For the me I was becoming."

"Free," Sam said. "Cas mentioned something like that, that all the burdens you carried were gone, and the pain with it. I never knew—I didn't realize what all of that was doing to you. Not when we were kids, and not when I was in high school. You were capable of happiness, because I _saw_ it. You had fun, Dean, in between the hunts. Hell, you had fun even _on_ most of the hunts! Later, though, well . . ." He shrugged. "Yeah, it was different. That day in River Grove, when I had the Croatoan virus and was about to kick the bucket, you said yourself, for the first time ever, that the life was wearing you down." His eyes were full of sorrow. "It had never occurred to me that it could."

Dean downed the last of the whiskey, scooped up the bottle and poured the tumbler full. "Well, there's this. Hunter's Helper. Makes up for the wearing down part." He drew in a breath, let it go on a noisy chuff of air. "I didn't know, when I first roused, first _resurrected_, that I was a demon. I was-I was fragmented. But the new pieces of me started finding one another and _assimilating_ me, like the Borg." Dean shrugged. "And then, like I said, he put the Blade into my hand."

Sam hadn't touched his drink again. "But you wrote that note."

Dean felt a shiver run down his spine. "Yeah. Crowley laughed at me. He said it was a suicide note, all emo and pathetic. But his eyes were . . . his eyes were _watchful_. And wary. Like he didn't know what I might do. And maybe he didn't. Mark of Cain, First Blade, Knight of Hell . . . he had to get a leash on me right away. Maybe he thought me wanting to write that note showed I wasn't going too far to the dark side too fast. Yet. So I . . . so I wrote it." He met Sam's eyes. "Later—later, I didn't care. Not even about you. When we met in the bar, you with one wing broken and still believing I was worth saving . . . well, I found it amusing, that a one-armed man was going against the Knight of Hell." Dean's smile was crooked as he tilted his head in acknowledgment. "But that's my Sammy, always there to catch me. I'm just sorry it took so long, that I killed so many people for Crowley's soul stash. That, well-that I . . . " he shifted in the chair, wanting whiskey again but not drinking, "that I didn't care anymore. That it was easier, felt better, just to beat my way through people, or slash them open with the Blade. Guess Alastair trained me well. I wonder if, wherever he is in hell, he was laughing at me. Bragging to others that his education led to something very special."

He didn't say it to Sam, but he remembered quite clearly Alastair's words: '_I carved you into a new animal.'_

"But you realized what had happened."

"Oh, I definitely realized. Probably within five minutes of writing that note. I healed the hole in my chest, learned how to breathe so I could fake being human for the chicks, and wanted to kill whatever I could. That's when Crowley said it was time to leave." He held Sam's gaze with his own. "Yeah. I imagine it was kind of a shock when I wasn't in my room."

Sam nodded. "I started looking for you—yeah, I learned that lesson after your return from Purgatory—and then when I saw that security camera video . . . well, I figured Crowley had taken your meatsuit and put another demon in it. I mean, it had to be Crowley. I summoned him." Sam blinked, blinked again, harder, slower. "I wonder if I hadn't summoned him, hadn't given him a way inside the bunker, so he couldn't find you and put the Blade in your hand . . . would it have happened? Maybe—oh hell, I don't know. Maybe you wouldn't have resurrected a demon. Maybe you wouldn't have resurrected at all." His eyes held the sheen of tears in them as he shifted in the chair. "I'd have tried other ways, but in the end, without success . . . I'd have given you to the pyre."

Dean nodded approval. "Crowley arranged it—hell, he set up the chain of events-but he didn't resurrect me. That was the Mark. I'd have resurrected anyway, Sammy, and I probably would have killed you before I left the bunker." He broke eye contact, stared hard at the whiskey. "Dunno if it would have been with the hammer, though." The he looked back at Sam abruptly. "I never understood it . . . never got it, Sammy. Why didn't you just stick me with Ruby's knife? Hell, even if you'd only caught a piece of me it would have slowed me down and you could have slapped those cuffs on me."

Sam smiled. "Didn't have to. Saw Cas coming up behind you."

"I could have jerked that hammer out of the wall, you know, and taken another whack."

"You wouldn't have killed me, Dean. Maybe you thought you would, but it never would have happened."

Sammy's unflagging faith nearly made him smile, except for the subject matter. "You can't know that."

"Yeah, I can. Because with Death's scythe in your hand, with the salvation of the world promised if you killed me, you didn't. You even asked my forgiveness, Dean, but you didn't do it. You never will. It's hard-wired_: Look_ _ out for Sammy_." He grinned. " You don't know how many times I heard Dad tell you that."

"Got pretty sick of it, too." Dean felt the knots in his neck untying. He didn't know if it was because he'd finally spoken about those terrible moments of rebirth as a demon, or because Sam once again looked up to his older brother and did not turn away no matter who he was. No matter _what_ he was.

Sam picked up his tumbler, suspended it in the air. "Me and thee, big brother. To me and thee."

Dean hesitated a moment, evaluating whether he was worth it. And then raised his own tumbler, stretched out his arm.

They tapped glasses and said, simultaneously, as Sam's dimples appeared and Dean's eye creases deepened, _"Come hell or high water."_

* * *

_ ~ end ~_


End file.
